


Forge Your Destiny

by SerenStone



Series: Destiny 2 Prompts [7]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Ada-1 Needs a Hug, Do Not Do As the Warlock Do, F/M, Grief, Multi, Original Ghosts, Original Guardians - Freeform, We Stan Ada-1 in this House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21995209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenStone/pseuds/SerenStone
Summary: Prompt from Destcember 2019's Day 7: Forge Your Destiny
Relationships: Ghost & Guardian (Destiny), Guardian/Ghost
Series: Destiny 2 Prompts [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1583290
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	1. Silla

Silla sat quietly as Ada-1 worked, watching with eyes nearly as large as Bee’s shell. Ada-1’s internal forge was capable of incredible feats of creation and Silla never got tired of watching. She had brought Ada-1 several crates full of … Silla assumed they were components but she really didn’t know. Now Ada-1 was meditatively compiling pieces and energies into the promised weapon. Eventually, Ada-1 turned to Silla, waving her to the table.

It was finished and glorious. A sniper rifle with the capacity to consume its entire clip to fire a bolt of energy that hit like a rail gun. Silla didn’t dare touch it yet. 

“What do you call it?” she asked quietly. 

“Izanagi’s Burden,” Ada-1 answered after a moment. "Shame. Guilt. Fear. We all bear them. Gather your regrets, purge them as best you can. Let your enemies feel the weight of your burdens."

Blinking away the burning in her eyes, Silla finally slipped her hands around the rifle reverently. “I can do that,” she breathed.


	2. Katya-7

Katya-7 growled under her breath as the fabrication machinery caught and jammed. Banshee-44 glanced over his shoulder at her before returning to his own work. He and Katya had a system. She’d provide him with piles of materials and specific supplies and he would allow her to use his workshop to tool her own armor. 

Astrophel appeared at her shoulder and worked with her to unjam and reset the machinery. Armorworking was one of the only times she knew of that Astrophel would be silent for long stretches. In spite of the jam, the piece in process was not damaged and she was able to resume shaping it into the necessary curves and angles. 

As she watched the machinery stamp the edges of each piece with the necessary grooves and ridges, Katya frowned. “Astrophel, did we double check the diameter of-”

“You did. I’ve checked it fourteen times.”

She felt her faceplate settle into something more peaceful and hoped that he wasn’t too bothered by her asking. “Thanks.”

“That run’s done,” he noted, drawing her attention back to the work at hand. She could only hope this helmet would work as well as it had in Astrophel’s simulations. Getting back up from a headshot left her with the ghost of a headache that she knew was psychosomatic but couldn’t seem to shake. 

“Let’s get this done.”


	3. Shry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do Not Do As The Warlock Do

“Well,” Shry took a deep breath. “Time to get started.” She dropped herself into the pilot’s seat of their jumpship and began pre-flight. “Any final notes?”

“None,” Isaac said.

“To the Almighty, then,” she muttered, frowning with distaste. 

The Almighty remained in orbit around Earth’s sun. No one was entirely certain how to remove or destroy it without further destabilizing the sun. While Shry was no longer the only Guardian or Earthborn to have been aboard, she was fairly certain she still came closer to understanding it than most. She had taken Isaac back with her to Io to access the Warmind Vault JYS-2 to get him as close to the same page as her as possible though nothing could replace experience. At least they wouldn’t have to walk around sun-side again. Probably.

Isaac was able to transmat them directly into the Almighty’s weapon systems. She walked into the primary turbine housing and examined the damage. As she thought, she had been quite thorough in her destruction of the turbine itself. She followed the power lines back to where the Almighty had once converted fuel into power. For all the destruction she had caused, the Almighty had not self destructed and there was still a great deal of energy left in the systems. 

Tyra Karn had once helped Shry build a small but functional engram encryption device. She and Isaac had more recently built a newer model with some changes: namely that this encryption device was designed to allow her to meddle with existing encryption and original code, rather than make a new encryption. Isaac had taken to calling it the Modulator. 

Isaac transmatted the device to their location with a prime engram already socketed inside. They had found the engram in a Golden Age vault on Mars and Rasputin had recommended it for her current project. It took them the better part of a day to hook up the Almighty’s power systems to the Modulator in such a way that it would not immediately overload and explode the machine. Their goal was to infuse the engram with power to such a degree that the engram would survive the next several phases of the project without being drained of its purity of energy and essential code.

Eventually satisfied, Isaac set the Modulator to drawing power from the Almighty and they settled in to wait. They simply didn’t have the materials to build an intake coupling for the Modulator that could draw sufficient power to do this quickly without frying the Modulator so they were doing this the long way. Isaac’s current projections put this phase at a duration of somewhere between four and seven days. 

In the end, modulating the engram took one hundred and fifty-nine hours, forty-three minutes, and seven seconds. 

“Could have been worse,” Shry mused, turning the engram over in her hands. “Certainly seems to have worked.”

“Definitively,” Isaac agreed. “I have no record of an engram with anything near this amount of charge by several orders of magnitude.”

Nodding, Shry tossed it towards him and he transmatted it onto the jumpship where he had already stowed the Modulator and their custom intake coupling before transmatting the two of them as well. “Time for the Forge,” she said settling into her chair while Isaac ensured their gear was prepared for travel. When Isaac was settled, she began the trip.

When they arrived at the Lighthouse Shry pressed a small pile of books into Brother Vance’s hands. “This was everything I could find from your list.” 

“Thank you,” he exclaimed, delighted as he looked through her gifts. “I have prepared the Infinite Forge for your arrival.”

“Thank you,” she inclined her head and headed for the Forge as Isaac transmatted the modulated engram to her hands. “Thank you,” she repeated more quietly so as not to disturb Vance’s students and acolytes. 

She carefully calibrated the Forge to accept an engram rather than prophetic codices, having spent months learning how to manipulate the Forge. When Isaac nodded, agreeing that it was properly tuned, she carefully fed the engram into the core. Isaac projected a series of diagrams, providing her with a real time feed of the state of the Forge and the engram. 

“Increasing core temperature,” Shry noted quietly as she manipulated the Forge’s energies. 

“Forge temperatures have reached optimal levels,” Isaac interrupted. Reeling in her control she concentrated to hold the Forge’s internal workings at that intensity. “Stabilizing,” he called. Shortly he added, “Ready to commence,” and “Commencing,” at Shry’s nod.

What followed was an hour or so of bright lights, a fight to maintain the Forge’s internal temperature, and a lot of quiet swearing. When Isaac called out, “Encoding complete,” Shry slumped and carefully reduced the Forge’s temperature and extracted the engram. “It was most certainly affected,” Isaac noted, scanning the engram. “Both the Forge’s and the Lighthouse’s unique energies are now influencing the code.”

“Good,” Shry sighed, recalibrating the Forge back to normal. “Now for the Lectern.” Isaac transmatted them back to the jumpship without expressing his distaste for this phase of the project. Shry set the engram down on the workbench and dropped herself on the cot as Isaac went through the pre-flight checks. 

“That wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be,” she admitted. 

“Perhaps the moon will be equally merciful,” Isaac mused.

She snorted. “Un-bloody-likely. Whatever the moon used to be, I don’t think it knows anything about mercy anymore.” 

When they arrived at the Lectern of Enchantment, Shry took the time to meditate with the Cryptoglyph as her focus in order to attune herself. With slow, measured movements she drew a thurible she and Isaac had constructed for the moon’s limited atmosphere from her belt and set incense burning within. Around the basin she spread candles, lit with void light, small solar flares, and arc sparks. Other objects she associated with pure focus she scattered around the table, crystals, stones, a pendulum, a small mirror, and a small, black, crystalline sphere. 

She looked around for Isaac. “You’re sure?” she asked again.

“I am.” 

Nodding, she drew her amulet from where it hung beneath her robes: as many pieces of Arthil’s shattered core as she could find, pressed together again but forever imperfect. Attuned to the Cryptoglyph as she was, she could see things lingering in Arthil’s core that she had never detected before but she did not allow herself to be swayed from her task. Arthil’s core she placed in front of the basin before she turned to Isaac to ask for the engram which she placed in the space between the basin and the Cryptoglyph, not surprised that it floated without assistance.

Shry took three, slow and deliberate breaths as a final preparation as Isaac moved to the opposite side of the Lectern. “Now,” she breathed and dove in. Into the basin she gently dropped alkane dust and spores, dusklight crystals, harmonic seraphite, simulated blooms, matterweave, and several masterwork cores, as well as an engram Rasputin had encoded with the Modulator. She opened a pouch and slowly she poured the contents into the basin: cleansed versions of each of the known essences found on the moon: anguish, brutality, despair, failure, fear, greed, isolation, jealousy, obscurity, rage, servitude, vanity. Lastly she opened a small wooden box from which immediately shone a pure beam of light. Three seeds of Light fell from her hand into the basin and the liquid began to churn. From the bottom of the box she lifted the final piece: a sliver of the Shard of the Traveler in the EDZ. This she slipped gently into the liquid, careful to avoid splashing.

Swallowing thickly, Shry held Arthil’s core in one hand while she ever so gently rested her fingertips on the Cryptoglyph lightly enough that it continued to spin unhindered. One final deep breath, and she triggered the power of the Lectern. 

Shry’s world faded to nothing but Light and she knew no more.


End file.
